


The Summer of Katie

by yvesdot



Category: Original Work, The Summer of Katie
Genre: (That one I will tag for.), Confusion, F/F, I can't... tag for everything; both of the MCs are LGBT gals and Katie is Indian, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Character of Color, LGBTQ Themes, Summer Vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 15:09:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14834634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yvesdot/pseuds/yvesdot
Summary: Thomasina Anderson wants this year’s awkward family vacation by the lake to be just like it always is, but she knows it won’t be easy to keep the peace while being her (bisexual?! she’s still in shock) self… and trying to befriend Katie, the guest who’s just begun her transition.Also available onWattpad.





	The Summer of Katie

The first time I heard about Katie was before the trip-- when we were all sitting around the dining table my dad was so proud of, trying to figure out what to do about her.

 

Usually, the family (not ‘my family’-- too many people to just be ‘my family’) decided about all the details of The Summer Vacation without me. Whether Great-Aunt Ethel could come for the whole week, or if she’d leave early, or if we should cut the whole thing short just so we wouldn’t hurt her feelings. We’d picked the latter last time, and everybody had hated it-- but that wasn’t why I was there. I’m sixteen now, which means I’m officially in the In-Between Zone. I’m not old enough to sit at the Adult Table during Thanksgiving, but I look super awkward sitting with the rest of the kids. So my compensation prize is helping with family decisions.

 

“So,” Uncle John asked, once we’d figured out the house (same house as every year) and the length of time (same as every year except last year). It was still mid-winter, but that’s when you had to start reserving houses by the lake-- otherwise, you couldn’t get a spot next to the water. This had been explained to me when I was six, but I hadn’t really grasped it then. “The... guests.”

 

There was a collective shifting of bodies in chairs. I tried to figure out what was going on; we’d had a serious amount of guests over the years-- the house had enough rooms for it, and pretty much everyone wanted to bring somebody else, just to show off the fact that we had a House At The Lake.

 

“Janice can’t come,” Aunt Cathy said. She coughed, like everything else, lightly. Sometimes I think if you poked her she’d fall over. 

 

“Okay,” my dad said. I’d heard about this much: we’d kind of run out of guests. People were cancelling left and right; someone had an important company outing, somebody else was getting too old to go on vacations-- it was looking like it would be just the family this year.

 

And then Uncle John repeated himself.

 

“So,” he said again. I looked to the other kids at my end-- cousins Ben, Alex, and Mike Jr. (yes, really)-- to see if this made more sense to them. But it looked like it did, since at least two of them were looking around all shifty-eyed. Mike Jr. was mostly focused with poking around on the table, tracing scars in the wood.

 

“So?” I asked, because nobody else was going to ask it. Everyone kind of swiveled around to look at me, which was weird, because not everybody was even turned that far away from me. Heck, I was facing my dad.

 

“We’re thinking about not bringing...” there was a long pause, while my dad sort of twiddled his thumbs.

 

“Katie,” Mike Jr. said, poking at the table. My dad frowned; he hates to see those scars pointed out. The truth is that I made them with pins when I was mad about not having a corkboard like my friend Bethany in the third grade, but he just doesn’t like it when someone notices that our table isn’t the glorious record of our dynasty that it’s supposed to be.

 

“Yes,” my dad said. “Katie.” He said the name like it was a kind of sushi he hadn’t tried. And like he didn’t like sushi.

 

“Katie?” It was weird for me to not know family friends, even distant ones. Everybody had already spoken to me at least once, because once you got in with one member of my family, you were in with  _ all  _ members of my family. Including the kid who doesn’t talk to anyone unless prodded.

 

(Which is me.)

 

“You met,” my dad said, pausing suspiciously, “ _...her.”  _ He paused again, as if at the end of a sentence, but this time more for approval. Everyone just kind of blinked at him, and he said, “a while ago, at the reunion.” He scratched his jaw. “In ‘08.”

 

“Okay,” I said, not knowing what that was supposed to mean. I met a  _ lot  _ of people at the family reunion in ‘08, which I wasn’t even sure I remembered.

 

“She’s our friend,” Alex said, leaning back on his chair in that way I always got told was rude when I imitated it. “You know, with the Silly Bandz?”

 

Okay, I knew. But not really-- the Cousins’ Friend With Silly Bandz I remembered was a guy, and the guy that I remembered was just somebody who stood in the corner by the fence and laughed at Ben’s jokes. The one with the curly hair, who I... thought was kind of hot, fine. And maybe I was too scared to talk to said cousins’ friend then... and also whenever I tried at the family vacations after.

 

“But your friend--”

 

“She’s Katie now,” Mike Jr. said, now poking the underside of the table.

 

“Oh,” I said, but on the inside I was saying  _ oh!!!  _ and thinking it was time to compose a poem. Something about meeting new LGBT people. And she wore Silly Bandz, and I wore that one chunky bi-flag color bracelet I got at Pride last year when I snuck out of the house and told my family I was going to a special student government meeting! Then I stopped bouncing my leg excitedly and thought a moment. “Is she not coming, either?”

 

“No, that’s not it.” My dad sort of scooted over in his chair, except there wasn’t room to scoot over. So mostly he just squirmed, and spoke like a robot with an uncommon defect. “We were thinking... of not inviting... her... this year.”

 

“Why not?”  _ The first year we’d have something in COMMON? _

 

Oh.

 

“I still think she should come,” Mike Jr. said, but he spoke in his distinctive perpetual mumble, which made it hard for anybody to really hear. He’s the strong and silent type, or something else the girls at my school like to say. They call him Stretch on the basketball team, but that’s only because he hunches over all the time and it surprises people that he’s tall enough to dunk.

 

Basically, Mike Jr. may as well have not said anything.

 

“I’m fine with it,” Ben said, flipping his hair out of his eyes. Ben is always flipping his hair out of his eyes. It’s like we can’t forget that he’s one of The Blonde Ones.

 

(I’m one of the... Light-Brown-That-My-Teacher-Once-Called-Red Ones, I guess.)

 

Alex shrugged.

 

“I think she should come, too,” I said, like we’d gotten some kind of majority vote and I was just joining in for the conclusion. All the adults at the table were looking at us like maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to invite the Sixteen-And-Up-Year-Olds to the table. 

 

“Will she go... to the beach?” Aunt Sarah asked. We all kind of looked at her, and I realized that the pre-Katie I knew didn’t know how to swim. But she’d always gone with us to the water, and she’d dipped her toe in, and sometimes gone waist-deep in her trunks and swim shirt. 

 

“I mean, she always has before,” I said, and Aunt Sarah looked at me like I was Saying The Wrong Thing again. It’s like this usually: I say something to a family member, and it was the wrong thing. I don’t say anything to a family friend, and that’s the wrong thing, too.

 

“But...  _ swimsuits,”  _ Aunt Sarah said, and I realized everyone was looking at me, like I was supposed to know everything about swimsuits, and being trans, and life-- and I don’t really know anything about anything. 

 

“I mean, trans people wear swimsuits, too,” I said, and then kind of wished I hadn’t, because  _ now  _ people were going to get into their You Aren’t  _ Like That,  _ Are You? faces. And I hate those faces, mostly because of how strongly they imply the Q word.

 

“But...” Aunt Sarah struggled to find something else to be upset about. Uncle Mike (Sr.) helped her out by saying wouldn’t it be  _ distracting,  _ and Uncle John said maybe it would be a good show of tolerance, and eventually the whole thing became a sort of awkward mess with Mike Jr. in the corner picking a hole in the dining room table and me trying to find words to say that wouldn’t make me sound  _ too...  _ knowledgeable. 

 

So far my parents still thought GSA was a book club, even if they’d noticed that all my ‘book club’ friends had dyed hair.

 

Eventually, my mom spoke up, which was half a surprise in itself. And then much more of a surprise when she sided with, of all people, me.

 

“Katie’s mother,” she said, doing the vocal equivalent of a tip-toe, “cannot afford to take Katie to the lake.”

 

There was a brief silence, in which I could sense Uncle Mike thinking,  _ what are we, a charity?  _ Uncle Mike, somehow, is always thinking  _ what are we?,  _ and sometimes saying it, too. Last year when Mike Jr. was trying to explain jump-roping as an exercise to build endurance, Uncle Mike asked, “what are you, a ballerina?” Mike Jr. said no, he was a basketball player, and Uncle Mike sent him to his room. I overheard all of this at the next reunion while pointedly not sneaking glances at Katie.

 

“We can’t kick somebody out just because they’re different from us,” I said, which came out sounding both stubborn and also somehow like one of those brave main characters in my mom’s collection of 1980s kids movies about girl power.

 

And then everyone else looked at me with these  _ yes, we can  _ faces, except I think Aunt Amy saw my point. Aunt Amy doesn’t speak often; she’s Ben’s mom and we don’t really talk about the fact that his dad ran off when he wasn’t born yet. Basically, Aunt Amy didn’t have a lot of free speech opportunities around the rest of the family, which meant someone else had to come to my defense.

 

“Of course! And we won’t, Thomasina,” my mom said, wearing less of a smile and more just A Lot Of Displayed Teeth. I wrinkled my nose.

 

(Yes it’s Thomasina, yes like the cat, no my mom didn’t name me after a cat, yes it’s a relative, yes she’s my great-great-grandma, yes I have a nickname and it’s Thomas. Please just call me Thomas; I don’t like doilies and I’m not going to marry a rich guy... probably.)

 

But from there things got more awkward, not less, because  _ now  _ we had to talk about which room to put her in, and which bathroom she’d get, and this and that and another thing about who was going to feel  _ uncomfortable  _ with whatever.

 

“Maybe we can put her in Janice’s room,” my dad said, and Aunt Cathy looked at him like he’d suggested we just go live in a cottage with no Wi-Fi this year, and maybe pet some poisonous animals while we’re at. “Well, Janice isn’t in it, is she?”

 

“No,” Aunt Cathy managed, and everyone sort of sat around digesting that.

 

“She can still use our bathroom,” Alex said, and shrugged at everybody’s glances. “Who cares? It’s a bathroom.”

 

Thank you, Alex Anderson, for the resounding display of allyship and support. I began composing a haiku on a world without boys.

 

“Sure,” my dad said, but after a long enough silence that we could all tell he’d be bringing this up any time we tried to act like he didn’t do enough for us. My dad (aka ‘Uncle Jeremy’) is in charge of orchestrating Christmas gifts for everybody but himself, and he won’t let Ben forget the drone he got last year; we’re all in constant debt to him and that’s how he likes it.

 

“So can we go now?” Ben asked, flipping his hair. 

 

There was a long pause.

 

“Yes,” my dad said. He’s also in charge of most family decisions. “Samantha?”

 

My mom pulled out her bag.

 

“Michael, here’s your phone back; Alex and Ben, here are yours; Thomasina, here’s your phone  _ and  _ your notebook.”

 

“Just Thomas,” I muttered for the fourteenth time that month. I wasn’t holding out, though, not after all the stink that went into me getting a pixie cut.

 

“What?”

 

I looked at my notebook. The first half of it was crumpled and sputtered from so many page-flips, erases, and edits; the second half looked like it had never been touched... which was mostly true. I’d numbered a couple extra pages, but nothing else. I added another heading:  _ ODE TO NOT BOYS.  _

 

“Nevermind,” I said, and went to my room to find an extra syllable for the line  _ stupid secretive jerks.  _ I would end up adding  _ -wad  _ into the  _ jerks,  _ which would just about do it. 

 

Still, even after writing three different stanzas in perfect format, I couldn’t stop thinking about the summer. I had been  _ planning  _ on maybe coming out, probably by showing my mom some poems about girls, but maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

 

I put the notebook down on my face and blew as hard as I could. It shifted slightly, and fell off. I could hear the sounds of half the group slowly filing out, and the other half asking my mom if she still had that Chateau Sauvignon white wine around, with some interest.

 

“Bleh,” I said.

 

It was not the first time I was saying it, and it would definitely not be the last.

 

Glasses clinked in the kitchen, and Mike Jr.’s feet moved down the hall. I could tell because he wasn’t sliding (Ben) and he didn’t sound like a sixteen-pound cat (Alex). He hovered around my room, then opened the door.

 

“Hey,” he said. I blinked at him from my position on the floor with my notebook on my face. We stared at each other for a bit, and he nodded and shut the door. His heavy, rhythmic sock-feet moved back down the hallway, then out to the front, where plates of something (probably tiny sandwiches with toothpick-speared olives) were being put out, probably with an added excuse about obviously having had some Left Over from some kind of fancy party, and not just having made something Just In Case people stayed to talk.

 

_ “Bleh,”  _ I repeated, this time with emphasis. 

 

(See?)

 

**Author's Note:**

> This is currently only a preview chapter! I can't guarantee consistent updates for a while, but I promise you'll meet Katie in the flesh (well, in the text) eventually. Definitely taking critique.


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